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With Drupal, if you have a content type with lots of records you can run into a problem where you start getting lots of "server has gone away" errors from MySQL. This stems from queries getting too long and MySQL giving up before the query has finished loading. So, to fix it, just edit your my.ini or my.cnf file to add the following line to the [mysqld] section:

max_allowed_packet=24M

There are other settings that can make a difference too, but this seems to be a good starting point.

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I'm trying to migrate one of my personal sites from Wordpress to Drupal and needed a way to migrate the existing data. Well, it turned out to be a little tricky as I'm using Drupal 6 while the only really useful converter, wp2drupal, was written for Drupal 5. Luckily someone converted wp2drupal to D6, so away I went.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to get far, it turned out that there was a problem in the D6 port which causes an "Access Denied" error when you actually submit the form to begin the conversion. Not to be undone, I started poking around the script and discovered that the menu configuration was using an older format than what the current Drupal release (v6.4) required. A few quick lines later and I was able to get it working again.

In the interests of helping the community I've compiled the changes into a patch file:

There are still a bunch of syntax errors that will show up after the data has converted, but at least it will actually convert the data over. Also, I made some minor tweaks to the code according to the Drupal development guidelines based on what the coder module recommended. Lastly, be warned that the patch was created using git, so it may be easier to just add the few missing "access" lines manually.

How do I get email notifications when something's changed in the wiki?

How do I get email notifications when code changes are uploaded?

Each project you want to manage with it gets its own separate install, which is very klunky. You have to log into each one separately (unless you set up a shared authentication system of some sort in the web server).

Each project only gets one repository.

The interface is klunky, e.g. clicking View Tickets brings you to a page where you first have to choose your filter rather than just loading the last one used or a default.

No task associations so you can't do a parent-child dependency to indicate a completion hierarchy.

Personally I recommend github for public projects where you don't need task management (I don't like Lighthouse), Unfuddle for closed projects or where you want good task management for your open project, or Redmine if you want full control and to host it all yourself.

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A key feature in Drupal is being able to create plugins/modules that create their own blocks, chunks of functionality that can be placed anywhere on the page by using the blocks/regions configuration or panels. If you do happen to create your own, bear in mind that while you automatically gain the features of the mail blocks table, you do not gain access to the boxes table, so you have to create your own body content block. Just thought you should know. And yes, this fact has just dawned on me. Doh.

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While trying to get git-svn to work on cygwin I came across a bunch of problems. As it turns out there are some problems with subversion-perl that ultimately cause git-svn to fail. Unfortunately it could be another few weeks before this is fixed as the maintainer of that perl module is on vacation. Argh.